Chasing a better title format

Two guys I like and respect very much, Terry Blount of the Dallas Morning News and Dave DeSpain of Speed Channel, have weighed in with their opinions about what tweaks NASCAR should make to the Chase for the Nextel Cup in 2007.
If you missed it late last week, NASCAR chairman Brian France said some changes in the format are likely after this year, which will be the third under the current plan.
I am sure other guys have expressed their opinions, too. But Blount and DeSpain each brought up something I wanted to address.
We’ll start with Blount.
One of the things NASCAR apparently wants to do is increase the chance that more than 10 drivers might qualify for the Chase in a given year. They could, of course, simply say the top 12 or top 15 gets into the “playoffs,” but for some reason it seems NASCAR would rather have the number “float.”
There’s talk of widening the window in which a team would make the Chase from within 400 points of first to within 500 or even 600. I’d prefer 500, because I want to see good teams miss the Chase, which is what makes the season’s first 26 races worthwhile.
Blount’s idea is to make it so any driver who wins one of the first 26 races makes for the Chase. I might could be talked into that if you added one codicil – any driver who runs in ALL 26 of those races and wins one of them makes the Chase.
No disrespect to Boris Said, because it would be a wonderful story if it happens, but if Said wins at Watkins Glen next month that doesn’t mean he should get a shot at winning the championship. Last year, Kasey Kahne won at Richmond in May but his team did not perform to a level where that win should have given him a berth in the Chase.
I think Blount would settle for a version of the 500-point idea I’ve been pushing for two years.
Give a driver a 500-point bonus for his first win in the regular season. Not for every win, mind you, just the first one. Every driver who wins a race gets that bonus, so if more than 10 win during the first 26 races it then becomes a matter of consistency among those winners. A 500-point bonus, conversely, would not be enough to get a part-time team into the Chase.
During the Chase, reset the counter so that a driver gets the bonus again for winning one of those 10 races. The championship contenders know that to win the title they have to win a Chase race, and drivers not in the Chase could go a long way toward finishing 11th or moving up in the final standings by stealing one of those wins away.
People freak out when I suggest a 500-point bonus, but the number doesn’t matter as long as it’s enough to make winning the most important thing toward making the Chase. If only 10 full-time drivers win during the first 26 races, I agree with Blount that those should be the 10 guys with a shot at the championship.
DeSpain believes that NASCAR has grown to a point where it needs to expand.
He advocates dividing into two “leagues” for the first 25 races, with one league running on Saturday and the other on Sunday. Then, the top 10 or 15 from each league moves into the championship series.
I just think it’s fairly well established that dividing your sport is not the way to go. If open-wheel racing cobbled together a season-ending five-race playoff between the best from the IndyCar Series and the best from ChampCar, would that be better than having all of the good drivers and all of the good teams racing on the same track’s all season long? I don’t think so, and I don’t see how having Jeff Gordon and Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth at one track and having Dale Earnhardt Jr., Tony Stewart and Jimmie Johnson at another on the same weekend helps NASCAR.
Another smart guy, Jeff Burton, said over the weekend at Daytona that NASCAR might think about putting 15 guys in a Chase with 15 races to go, then cutting it to 10 with 10 to go and five with five to go like a true playoff. That’s better than the two leagues idea, I think.